Did you know that resting for a climber isn’t a luxury? It’s a body necessity. Your body needs to recuperate, and your muscles need to grow and strengthen.
So don’t underestimate a day of rest.
What To Do While Taking a Rest
Rest days allow your muscles, nerves, bones, and connective tissues time to rebuild.
Climbing is really harsh on your arms mainly.
The most common injuries in climbing are in the shoulder areas, fingers, wrists, and elbows.
When we climb, we use a lot of shoulder moves, especially when bouldering.
Related Read: The Top Safety Precautions in Climbing
Stretching
While taking rest days, you should stretch all of your muscles. I recommend at least taking 20 minutes or more.
Eat Healthily
Eating healthy foods such as protein, whole grains, lots of veggies, berries, and healthy fats from nuts, avocados, and olive oil also helps your body rebuild and refuel so that your muscles and performance work at peak activity levels when back at the rock or indoor gym.
Pain relive for muscles
My top recommendation, since I suffer a lot from shoulder pain and minor injuries, including my fingers, is to put cold water for ten minutes on your injury then put hot water alternating back and forth for 3 sets. If you have the time.
If not, at least two rounds of cold and hot.
Small Exercises
Another important thing to do is small exercises that have nothing to do with climbing. My top choices are taking long walks with my dogs or going for a soft run.
Most of the time I don’t actually feel like I need to take a rest day, but I still do take rest days because I know that if I don’t rest I can get a long-term injury and nobody wants that.
You actually get stronger during rest days not training days because on rest days your body rebuilds into a stronger one, that’s what the top male and top female climbers do.
If you don’t rest you’ll soon be finding yourself climbing very badly, getting injuries, and maybe even getting long-term injuries.
And that means not climbing at home.
So the one rest day in between training sessions can save you months of not climbing.
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